Abstract
This Comment analyzes the racist origins and consequences of contemporary reproductive justice schemes. Specifically, it situates contemporary debates surrounding reproductive justice within the context of the Thirteenth Amendment. It examines three specific features of the contemporary landscape for reproductive rights and justice, hoping to highlight their connections to a much longer history, one directly linked to chattel slavery: (1) abortion bans, (2) forcing pregnant people to give birth in conditions they did not choose for themselves, under the auspices of “fetal protectionist” statutes; and (3) separating families, in the context of the family regulation system.
This Comment looks to the original construction of that Amendment, whose framers saw it as a text with an expansive purpose: to disrupt and destroy the institution of chattel slavery, as well as systems embedded within it. Using that original, expansive vision, which mandates the abolition of slavery’s vestiges, as well as the institution of slavery itself, contemporary reproductive justice advocates might be able to argue for the abolition of racist, predatory systems with a reinvigorated sense of the stakes at hand.
Alternatively, when the institution of chattel slavery is understood narrowly, as involuntary servitude alone, without any examination of the systems that made that servitude possible (including, among so many others: forced birth and the separation of families), the Amendment becomes dead-letter law. Given the robust connections between numerous systems still operating in full force today with chattel slavery, this is a lost opportunity for advocates seeking to organize.
This Comment seeks to provide an antidote to the deracination of the Amendment that has taken place since the end of Reconstruction, where the 13th Amendment serves only to outlaw chattel slavery. This interpretation, as I show, flies in the face of the expansive vision that the Amendment’s drafters once had, a vision that can be valuable to contemporary reproductive justice advocates.
